Pieces of a Life , livre ebook

Inspiring Voices - Kellogg Pellettiere Diane

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

183 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

You see two very different families, the Merediths and the Kelloggs, when Ruth and John meet in 1926. You watch their recent family history unfold, centering on their parents and grandparents. Ruth's early diaries and John's autobiography form the underpinnings of their story.Ruth at twenty and John at twenty-seven are from different worlds. John Webb Kellogg was born into wealth, son and grandson of engineers in Buffalo, New York. John's money and future disappear, it seems, when his father dies, leaving little but a sixteen-room house to his second wife, a young Irishwoman, and their two children, John and Dorothy. John is driven to succeed, much like the Scottish-English Kelloggs who preceded himimpatient, quick-tempered. He feels cheated out of the lifestyle he enjoyed as a child. He works his way through the University of Michigan, riveted on making money and living well.Just out of Austin High in Chicago, Ruth Viola Meredith is a sweet, kind girl who worked very hard to graduate. She loves making clothes, going to movies, and playing games with her girlfriends. She dreams about a steady beau, but no one appears. Ruth, her brother, Jimmie, and her parents live in blue-collar Austin, a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. Her father came from a farm in Berrien County, Michigan, as a young man. Her mother's side came from the East Coast in the mid-1800s. Ruth's roots are English, Dutch, and Welsh.

Sujets

Lettres et linguistique

Informations

Publié par	Inspiring Voices
Date de parution	13 septembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781462407583
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Pieces of a Life
Diane Kellogg Pellettiere

Copyright © 2013 Diane Kellogg Pellettiere.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Inspiring Voices books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

Inspiring Voices
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.inspiringvoices.com
1-(866) 697-5313

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4624-0727-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4624-0758-3 (e)

Inspiring Voices rev. date: 9/11/2013

Contents
Pieces of A Life
A Glimpse of Ruth’s Roots
A Picture From the Past
Looking at Austin’s Beginnings
Ruth -1925
Ruth - 1926
John - Growing Up
Autumn, 1974 – 75 Years – Where Did They Go?
In Ruth’s Words – 1929
Newlyweds Ruth & John
John’s View of Married Life & the Great Depression
Notes & Bits of Ruth’s Diary from the 1940’s On
Diane’s Reflections

Pieces of A Life
June 16, 1996
My mother died at one o’clock this morning. She was three weeks from her 90th birthday, but unaware of that—and almost everything else—lost in the thickening cloud of Alzheimer’s that descended in her 70s. The hospital staff said she had appeared asleep, but was no longer inhabiting that small, frail body, a shell of the one she’d had when I was a child. Not that she was obese at 40 and 50, but “pleasantly plump”, as my father would have said, giggling from behind his hand, his eyes tearing with the humor of his remark.
This is the story of Ruth and her family, illuminated by her diaries and her husband’s brief autobiography at the age of 75. In those last ten years of her life she slowly disintegrated, both in mind and body. Of course, the downward spiral had started long before when she left her parents’ home to marry. Who Ruth was—and could become—changed on that day. From then on her light-hearted spirit eroded as though a rushing river were wearing it away, bit by bit. Much later she knew the price she had paid for decades of living with a very controlling man, someone narrowly focused on himself and whatever he wanted.
Who was this woman? I thought I knew, but perhaps not without the insight of her diaries. Then again, it’s hard to see your mother as a separate, distinct person. She is blurred by time and the perspective of a child.

A Glimpse of Ruth’s Roots
A baby girl, my mother, was born three or four weeks premature to a blue-collar family on Chicago’s West Side on July 5, 1906. Tired of being pregnant, young Lottie Meredith talked husband Jim into taking her on a bumpy carriage ride on July 4 th . Lottie was only 19. Off they went in the heat, heading west toward open prairie and the small towns clinging to the railroad tracks running out of bustling Chicago.
After an hour in the jostling carriage, Lottie said, “I hope this will make the baby come quick. I don’t want to wait until the end of July.”
Alarmed, Jim turned around and they headed back home, leaving the fields, farms and sprinkling of small towns behind. Soon they were back in Chicago, the wheels spewing dust from the hot, dry July weather. It was Independence Day, so it seemed that everyone was out and about.
Lottie’s plan worked. She did go into labor. The following day Ruth Viola Meredith was born with the help of a midwife. Because Ruth was so small—under five pounds—Lottie greased her and kept her in a warm coal oven with the door ajar for the first weeks of her life. Perhaps the midwife had suggested it. Lottie’s mother had died when she was nine.
Since pouring through Ruth’s diaries, I’ve wondered if that strange start in life was linked to the memory problems she had in school and later the crushing blow of Alzheimer’s. Did having a coal oven for a crib play a part?
Ruth was named for her two grandmothers, Ruth Olmstead Meredith and Viola Hawley Weekes. Her mother was blonde, blue-eyed Carlotta Lola Lucretia Weekes and her father was James B. Meredith, age 25. (He had no middle name, so added the “B.”, for his Maryland-born grandfather, Benjamin Meredith.) At five feet seven inches, Jim was just three inches taller than Lottie and echoed her coloring. They went on to have one other child, James William, in 1911.
Lottie and Jim met through church, a key place to find a mate over a hundred years ago. They came from different parts of the country, both with troubled families.
Jim spotted Lottie when she walked in. The Baptist church had a small congregation, so a pretty new face with bright blue eyes wreathed in thick, long blonde hair stood out. Wearing a pale pink dress, Lottie looked to Jim like a dream come true. He had moved down from a farm in Berrien County, Michigan, got a job in Chicago and, at 24, was eager to marry. Lottie was standing with another woman, her friend Martha Miller.
“Hello, Martha,” he said, walking up to the two women. “I see that you’ve brought a guest.
“Hello, Jim, I’d like you to meet Lottie Weekes. She has just moved into my neighborhood.”
“How do?” said Lottie, smiling and gently taking the arm Jim offered to go up a few stairs into the sanctuary. Martha Miller trailed them, sitting with them as they got acquainted before the minister stepped up to the pulpit.
“I am fine—and so glad to see a new face, especially a pretty one,” said Jim. He winked and smiled, not wanting to seem too forward.
“I haven’t been in a Baptist church before, but thought I would go with Martha to see what it was like. It’s so close to where I live with my father and brother.”
“Oh, has your mother passed on?”
“Yes, in 1896. She was only 38. Two of my brothers have died too, one as a baby and another as a boy.”
Within a year, they had married.
Lottie was born in Chicago. Her parents had come west, flowing with the river of migration from the East Coast in the 1850s. Lottie’s mother, Viola Hawley, was originally from New York or New Jersey, arriving in Illinois as a small child. She rode west with her mother, Mary Lewis Hawley, her older sister, Laura, and Laura’s husband, Joseph Cornell, who worked for the railroad. Mary was in middle age and without her husband. The Hawleys and Cornells lived in Clinton, Iowa before Mary and Viola moved on to Chicago.

Mrs. Millard, Jimmie and Lottie Meredith at 5351 Monroe St., Chicago in 1917. Lottie lived with Mrs. Millard for four years after her mother’s death.
On the other side, Jim Meredith was from southwestern Berrien County, Michigan near Niles. His father, Nathaniel, and his grandmother, Esther Ann Pullman Norton Lyons Meredith, had moved up to Michigan from Illinois by 1860, just in time for him to fight in the Civil War. Born in Maryland in 1801, Nathaniel’s father, Benjamin, was an Army man. He had fought in the Seminole War—which was also known as the Florida War—as well as the Black Hawk War in northwestern Illinois. Benjamin, a wheelwright, was one of the soldiers who accompanied Black Hawk to Washington D.C. after he was caught with his tattered band of women, children, and old men.
How I would love to have Benjamin’s reflections on that trip to the East! Was he sympathetic toward Black Hawk? Fearful? How interesting that Ben made wheels and fixed wagons in the Army for a living. His grandson and great-grandson were also very able at making and fixing things with their hands.
After his tour of duty ended in Missouri in the late 1830s, Benjamin stayed in the West. At 37, Ben and Esther Pullman, who had been married twice before, settled in western Illinois’ Hancock County on the Mississippi River. Had Ben served with one or both of Esther’s husbands? Twelve years younger, Esther was born in 1813 in Spafford, New York. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ben had had another wife earlier in his life.
In the late 1990s husband Dan and I visited the southern area of Hancock County near the Adams County line where the Merediths had lived 150 years earlier. I half expected to see an old house or barn, at least some remnants of the Merediths so many years earlier. Sadly, there was a dilapidated, abandoned gas station and little else.
Hancock County is best known for a town named “Nauvoo” where the Mormons settled, built a large, prosperous city and then fled for their lives to escape the wrath of the local citizenry. Both jealous and fearful, the local folks didn’t understand them. The Mormons trekked on to Iowa and parts west.
Jim’s mother’s family had come from upstate New York in the mid-1800s. His mother, Ruth Parks Olmstead, spent time in at least one mental institution in Michigan. Was it just a menopausal issue or something more severe and permanent? I remember my grandmother telling me how her mother-in-law would throw playing cards in the fireplace because she thought card games were sinful. It probably wasn’t so unusual then, especially among Baptists.
That long-ago Ruth was a four-foot, nine-inch woman whose big stick was her anger. Jim’s brother, Arthur, also had some mental issues, the picture of what they were shadowed. This wasn’t something you discussed back then or eve